TY - CHAP A1 - Wiemann, Dirk T1 - Being Taught Something World-Sized BT - 'The Detainee's Tale as Told to Ali Smith and the Work of World Literature T2 - The Work of World Literature N2 - This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading. KW - Ali Smith KW - anagogy KW - ethics KW - Refugee Tales KW - singularity KW - world literature Y1 - 2021 SN - 978-3-96558-011-4 SN - 978-3-96558-012-1 SN - 978-3-96558-013-8 SN - 978-3-96558-022-0 U6 - https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_07 SN - 2627-728X SN - 2627-731X VL - 2021 SP - 149 EP - 172 PB - ICI Berlin Press CY - Berlin ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Wolf, Hans-Georg A1 - Peters, Arne T1 - Cognitive sociolinguistic studies of African English BT - a methodological review and outlook T2 - Cognitive sociolinguistics revisited (Applications of Cognitive Linguistics (ACL)) N2 - This chapter presents an overview of Cognitive Sociolinguistic studies of African English. We discuss early applications of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to the study of English in Cameroon (Wolf 1999, 2001; Wolf and Simo Bobda 2001) as well as the extensive and methodologically diverse body of Cognitive Sociolinguistic research on the cultural model of COMMUNITY expressed in West and East African English (e.g., Wolf 2006, 2008; Wolf and Polzenhagen 2007; Polzenhagen and Wolf 2007; Polzenhagen 2007). Moreover, the chapter illustrates how studies such as Finzel and Wolf (2017), Peters (2021), Finzel (forthcoming) and Peters and Polzenhagen (2021) extend the Cognitive Sociolinguistic approach to further sociocultural issues, such as gender identities and culture-specific strategies of advertising in different anglophone parts of Africa. Finally, we point out possible future applications of the paradigm to socio-pragmatic aspects of African English. KW - Cognitive Sociolinguistics KW - African English KW - cultural conceptualizations KW - World Englishes KW - methodology Y1 - 2021 SN - 978-3-11073-394-5 SN - 978-3-11073-851-3 SN - 978-3-11127-102-6 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733945-036 VL - 48 SP - 457 EP - 466 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Wolf, Hans-Georg A1 - Finzel, Anna T1 - Colonial cultural conceptualizations and world Englishes T2 - Research developments in world englishes N2 - In this paper, we take a cognitive-sociolinguistic perspective on texts from the colonial period. The texts stem from various agents in the colonial enterprise and include documents from missionaries, administrators and politicians, as well as legal and scientific texts. What we find and trace in these texts is a recurrent set of dominant systems of conceptualizations that are characteristic of the colonial mindset and the corresponding discourse at large. However, these conceptualizations were spelled out in quite different ways in discourse, depending on the ideological background and objectives of the authors and on the specific colonial setting they deal with. We will focus on two contexts, India and sub-Saharan Africa, and we will highlight conceptualizations related to the framing of the constellation between colonizers and colonial subjects in terms of, inter alia, a parent-child, an adult-child and a teacher-pupil relationship. We will then look into some examples of cultural practices among the colonized that were “disturbing” to the colonizers. The fact that they were betrays value systems as well as preoccupations and fears on the side of the colonizers. These practices triggered efforts at cultural engineering in the colonies which had lasting effects on the local culture in these settings. However, this impact was far from being one-directional. The experience with the “otherness” of the colonial subjects fueled debates on latent societal issues in the culture of the colonizers. We will consider this impact for the case of the discourse on homosexuality. The empire stroke back also in linguistic terms, most notably by a host of loan words that entered the lexicon of English. The way these loan words were “integrated” into the English language provides ample evidence of a cultural appropriation also in this direction, i.e., the process known as “contextualization” in traditional Kachruvian sociolinguistics is bi-directional as well. KW - sociolinguistics KW - linguistic anthropology Y1 - 2021 SN - 978-1-3501-6708-7 SN - 978-1-3501-6705-6 SN - 978-1-3501-6706-3 SN - 978-1-3501-6707-0 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350167087.ch-010 SP - 199 EP - 230 PB - Bloomsbury Academic CY - London ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Finzel, Anna T1 - Innate or acquired? BT - homosexuality and cultural models of gender in Indian and Nigerian English T2 - Cultural-Linguistic Explorations into Spirituality, Emotionality, and Society (Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts) (CLSCC) N2 - In this chapter, some of the findings from sociolinguistic interviews with 25 speakers of Indian English and 26 speakers of Nigerian English are presented. Emanating from a larger research project concerned with conceptualizations of gender, the current analysis focuses on conceptualizations of homosexuality and makes use of the analytical tools provided by Cultural Linguistics and Cognitive Sociolinguistics. In particular, the notions of “cultural conceptualizations” (e.g., Sharifian, 2011, 2017) and “cultural model” (e.g., Wolf & Polzenhagen, 2009; also cf. Schneider, 2014) are addressed. At the time of data collection, discriminatory legislation concerning homosexuality was in force in India and Nigeria. Opinion polls likewise echoed a negative stance towards homosexuality among the population of the two countries. This raised the expectation that similar conceptualizations of homosexuality might be found in Indian and Nigerian English, both in terms of their negative connotation and of how homosexuality would exactly be conceptualized. However, this expectation was not fulfilled. Firstly, the acceptance among the Indian participants to this study was generally greater. Secondly, homosexuality was predominantly conceptualized as an innate condition in the Indian English data, while it was prevalently understood as an acquired condition by the Nigerian informants. Drawing from earlier findings within the context of the same project (Finzel, 2021; fc.), I suggest that these differences can be explained with culture-specific models of gender that lend their logic to conceptualizations of homosexuality. KW - cognitive sociolinguistics KW - cultural linguistics KW - cultural conceptualizations Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/clscc.14.09fin VL - 14 SP - 185 EP - 212 PB - John Benjamins Publishing Company CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Wolf, Hans-Georg T1 - Cultural conceptualizations of magical practices related to menstrual blood in a transhistorical and transcontinental perspective T2 - Cultural-Linguistic Explorations into Spirituality, Emotionality, and Society (Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts (CLSCC) N2 - Most, if not all, of the studies in Cultural Linguistics have (a) taken a synchronic perspective or (b) focused on specific, intracultural conceptualizations. In my chapter, I will look at a cluster of conceptualizations that have been found to exist in different historical periods, in different languages and varieties, and on different continents. The case in point is conceptualizations of magical practices based on menstrual blood. The existence of these conceptualizations across time and space raises the challenging questions of their motivation, and, more generally, the “flow of conceptualizations.” While these questions will be pursued in my chapter, the main focus will be on an elaboration of the conceptual network of conceptualizations pertaining to menstrual blood magic. KW - cultural conceptualizations KW - menstrual blood Y1 - 2021 SN - 978-9-02725-970-7 SN - 978-9-02720-916-0 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/clscc.14.04wol VL - 14 SP - 41 EP - 76 PB - John Benjamins Publishing Company CY - Amsterdam ER -